Review: An Update on Our Family (2025)
#familychannel #pregnant #announcement
The following review originally ran in our coverage of the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival. It has been edited and revised.
Whether you watched religiously or not, we were all there for the rise of the family vlogger on YouTube. These are (I wish I could use the word were, but it’s still happening and thriving) the content creators who filmed every birth, birthday, Christmas, celebration, milestone, breakfast, lunch, dinner, scraped knee, new pool, and Barbie-sponsored tea party that took place within the walls of their homes - the place typically reserved for personal privacy. Maybe they posted every single day of the week, 365 days of the year, or maybe they had set dates and times. You could witness a stranger's child grow from embryo to toddler, watching every single step of the way. You could rock their merch and smash the like button.
Then there was the fall of the industry. We didn't all see it coming, but almost none of us were surprised by it when it did happen. Shay Carl (allegedly) cheated on his wife, the Saccone-Joly family stirred controversy, and countless other family vloggers were put under the microscope. The ethics of the entire thing seemed out of whack as children seemed to be exploited for monetary gain. Without the ability to consent, their whole lives were put on the internet for the entire world to see.
And then there were the Stauffers. Even with all the scandals and controversies and ethical dilemmas these vloggers created, this one might take the cake. In a summarizing sentence, Myka and James Stauffer adopted a young autistic boy, Huxley, from China and when they found his challenges too difficult, went through the process of "un-adopting" him.
Along with their four other children, everything this family did was posted on YouTube. Viewers watched them go through the adoption process, fly to China to pick him up, and then experience years of struggles (which, as some Sherlockian viewers pointed out, included evidence of duct tape on the boy's wrists), all before Huxley just plain disappeared from their channel without a word.
That's what An Update on Our Family chronicles, all while putting it in the context of the rest of the industry. The documentary is largely interesting because the story itself is interesting. The despicable, greedy, selfish nature of the parents is often upsetting and confounding. Many folks feel like the Stauffers made these decisions almost solely for the views and therefore monetization, and much less because it's something they actually had the capacity to handle.
The talking heads, meanwhile, show just how complicated this whole industry is, especially to those still in it. Mommy vlogger Hannah Cho, herself a transracial adoptee adopted by white parents, provides context and the closest thing we have to real-life experience, but she seems unable to grapple with the issues at hand. A similar family, called Earls Family Vlogs on YouTube and whose recent videos have titles like “FIRST WORD!” and “GENDER REVEAL! After 4 boys BABY #5 is a…….”, seems at best clueless to the ethical problems and at worst defensive and secretive as they defend the Stauffers. "Be very careful," demands father Harold to his wife Rebecca when the subject is brought up by the filmmakers. What do they have to hide?
At 139 minutes spread across three episodes, this could have probably been a really tight 90-120 minute documentary, but this is very clearly the exact type of thing that streamers like Max thrive on - weekly episodes drop every Wednesday and there’s plenty of fodder for discussion in the in-between.
Two of the three episodes have dropped on Max - the finale premieres January 29th.